The Productivity Secrets of the Air Force’s Disaster Gurus

Hurricane Florence was a day away from drowning the East Coast, but the airmen were at ease. The members of the Air Force’s 621st Contingency Response Wing—a unit designed to respond to natural disasters—could only guess at what was coming. A year earlier, when the United States had been battered by the one-two-three punch of hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, nearly four hundred men and women from the 621st had deployed to help with the relief effort. If the storm now churning in the Atlantic made landfall with the ferocity of any of those disasters, a lot of the people I saw walking through McGuire Air Force Base would be launching into action within hours. And yet, no one looked rushed or harried. The gloomy weather made everything on the base seem like it was happening in slow motion—the giant arms of the storm had pressed clouds down on all of southern New Jersey, and the air was eerily still.

There was a reason that everyone was so calm: they were prepared. They were so prepared that they could spend hours that autumn day in 2018 showing me around the base without affecting in the slightest their hurricane relief efforts that might soon begin. I had spent a year embedding in different organizations facing high-pressure deadlines, and these airmen were the coolest customers I had encountered yet. What did they know that the rest of us didn’t?

As the unit’s name suggests, the Contingency Response Wing responds to “contingencies,” which can range from earthquakes and hurricanes to the last-second crises that can crop up in a war zone. The 621st can open an airfield capable of landing giant aircraft just about anywhere in the world. And in a disaster, a working airfield can mean the difference between life and death for people needing shelter, food, and water.

On the eve of a storm that would keep the Carolinas underwater for weeks, the unit’s leaders, Chief master Sergeant David Abell and Colonel Ryan Marshall, walked me through their operation. I told them it didn’t look like anyone was about to go hop on a cargo plane and coordinate a wide-reaching relief effort, but they assured me they were poised to do just that. “We’re ready,” Marshall said. “We are designed to go in quick, light, lethal, agile.”

Each mission was essentially unknowable until it arrived, but the commanders were certain they could handle it. There was a lesson here for anyone facing more mundane deadlines, but it took me a while to learn it.

Major Shane Hughes drove me from headquarters to the warehouse where the 621st keeps everything it needs to go anywhere in the world. Inside, he pointed to pallets with giant tents on them, portable showers, heaters, generators, air tanks, and boxes of MREs (the airmen had recently celebrated the addition of Skittles to these meals). Giant bladders filled with potable water, other bladders filled with jet fuel. A collapsible trailer that could serve as an operations center with satellite communications. Once a week, every pallet was checked to make sure it was still ready to go.

Outside there were Ford F-350s and Humvees painted olive drab, and giant forklifts with oversize tires meant to operate on uneven terrain. The members of the 621st were trained to work under any lighting conditions, including with night-vision goggles during complete blackout. I asked how they could drive a forklift in the pitch black. “Very, very slowly,” Hughes said. Everything, from the vehicles to the stacks of MREs, was sized to fit on one of the three planes the 621st uses, the C-5, the C-17, or the C-130.

While we were inspecting the gear, two of Hughes’s men joined us. Sergeants Ronald Rowe and Donald Wheeland had both been with the 621st when the unit deployed to Haiti after Hurricane Matthew, in 2016. Matthew was a Category 4 hurricane when it made landfall, the strongest storm to hit Haiti since 1964. For a country still reeling from the 2010 earthquake, it was a devastating blow. More than 200,000 homes were damaged, 546 people died, and nearly 1.4 million were in need of aid. The Haitian government called Washington, and the Pentagon called up the 621st. Within fourteen hours they were on the ground in Port-au-Prince. “I was on one of the first trucks,” Rowe said.

Rowe and Wheeland walked me through how they had mobilized to respond. It wasn’t what I expected. To start, the men and women who were deploying didn’t pack their bags, they didn’t start assembling information about their mission, they didn’t run around making sure everything got loaded onto a cargo plane. Instead, they went home, where their bags were already packed—every squadron designated “on alert” keeps their bags ready to go—and they spent some time with their husbands, wives, children, girlfriends, and boyfriends.

Hughes explained: “Once we get that deployment order, we’re all going home to make sure that everything is lined up with our families, that all the bills are going to get paid. All those little things that if you’re going to be gone for sixty days, that’s all taken care of.” Being part of a unit that can be called away at any time is stressful enough—this at least allows for a proper good-bye. Keeping the families happy was just as important to overall morale as taking care of the airmen themselves.

Back on base, a mission planning cell, made up of airmen who weren’t deploying, had twelve hours to complete all the prep work. That included communicating with the Haitian government, gathering intel on the state of the local infrastructure, and preparing to bring in whatever the situation required. The Port-au-Prince airport was still usable, so the focus was on setting up a system to get as many planes of relief supplies on the ground, unloaded, and back in the air as quickly as possible. As the clock wound down toward the end of the twelve-hour deployment window, the airmen on alert came back on base and got a full briefing from the mission planning cell.

“Basically they hand us all of the information, the contacts, everything that they’ve got when we’re on our way out the door,” Hughes said. “Then, they’ll keep working even after we’re gone to get more information, so that whenever we land, our in-boxes just explode with good info.” Rowe and Wheeland said that once they arrived in Haiti, they set to work almost at once to build a new helicopter landing pad: there wasn’t room to land airplanes and helicopters at the same time, so they had to improvise.

Food started arriving from abroad in military and civilian aircraft, which the 621st loaded onto helicopters that flew to some of the hardest-hit areas, places where every tree had been shorn of its leaves. “We started loading helicopters with bags of rice, as much as they could handle,” Rowe said. “I think we were busting their capacity sometimes.”

The 621st stayed on the ground in Port-au-Prince for fourteen days. And then they did the whole operation in reverse. “After fourteen days, you just pack everything up, put it back on the plane, and fly it back here?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Rowe, and all three of the airmen laughed.

“We get the equipment back to one hundred percent as fast as possible,” Hughes said, “and then we can set ourselves back up to go and do it again.”

If the 621st is the Air Force’s vanguard response unit, Alpha Mike is the vanguard of the vanguard. They are the advance team that deploys before all the rest to assess whatever airfield the unit is planning to use and make sure it can handle that first cargo plane—and every one after it. Whereas the 621st has the capability to send hundreds of men and women to a disaster, Alpha Mike is always the same size: eight airmen, each an expert in one part of what’s needed to determine if an airfield is ready to receive heavy traffic.

Shane Hughes called Alpha Mike “our lighter and leaner first group of responders” as he walked me over to the hangar where they were based. Their alert package is much smaller: two Humvees loaded with supplies and two all-terrain vehicles called MRZRs (“em-razors”) for navigating in areas that the Humvees can’t go. It’s made to fit on the smallest of the planes the 621st uses.

Six members of Alpha Mike were waiting to meet us. Hughes introduced me to the officer in charge, Major Allen Jennings. He was skinny, with a flop of hair shaved close around the ears. Before I could ask him a question, Jennings announced that rather than talking in the hangar, we were going to go for a ride in the MRZRs. I was handed a motorcycle helmet (on missions they use combat helmets) and a pair of waterproof fatigues. There might be some mud along the way, Jennings warned me, but “we’re going to try to keep the vehicle upright.”

The MRZR looked like a supercharged, battle-hardened golf cart. Like everything else the 621st uses, it runs on jet fuel. We climbed in, four to a golf cart, and sped off. My driver was Sergeant Thomas Vaughn. He had dark, slicked-back hair, like Brando in The Wild One, if you replaced all of Brando’s rebel attitude with aw-shucks earnestness. I wondered how much he knew about the storm that was coming, but the MRZR’s engine was so loud we could barely talk.

We turned off the paved road onto a gravel one that led into a forest. After about fifteen minutes, we left the gravel road for no road. It looked like we were plunging randomly into the underbrush. We stayed upright, though at times just barely.

We stopped when we reached a clearing, and Vaughn pulled off his helmet. His hair fell into his eyes. “Hey,” he said, “since you work at GQ, do you know if there’s a pomade that will stand up to a helmet?” (I did not.) Meanwhile, the whole team had assembled around Jennings. “We figured this would be a better place to talk than back on base,” he said. First, he walked me through the eight members of the team.

There was an operations officer to coordinate air traffic control, two civil engineers to test the hardiness of the runway, a communications specialist to make sure they could send information back to the Pentagon, a cargo specialist, and a single member of the security forces, who was more heavily armed than the rest and kept the whole operation safe. Vaughn was security for Alpha Mike—he called himself the team’s “cop.” The last member of the team was a high-ranking officer—a colonel or a general—to handle on-the-ground talks with the local government.

After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, an Alpha Mike team was sent to the island to figure out which airports could support relief missions. San Juan airport was usable—and supplies did come in that way—but the Pentagon didn’t want to get in the way of civilian flights. (Before and after the storm, as many as 400,000 Puerto Ricans left the island.) Attention quickly turned to a decommissioned naval base called Roosevelt Roads about 40 miles east of San Juan. The only problem was that it hadn’t seen heavy traffic since the Navy turned it over to civilian control in 2004. Alpha Mike’s job was to go to Roosevelt Roads and see if its runways were ready to handle the arrival of approximately 40,000 pounds of cargo an hour, 24 hours a day. That involved drilling dozens of holes all along the runway, taking core samples, and analyzing whatever data they could collect. The goal was to determine not just how big a plane could safely land at the airfield, but how many total takeoffs and landings the strip could handle before it fell apart. A million pounds of cargo a day will beat up just about any airport. Four hours. That’s the amount of time Alpha Mike has on the ground to deliver its assessment back to base before the bigger crews start arriving. Jennings described that window as “tight,” the first admission I’d heard from anyone on the base that what they do is incredibly tricky. To pull it off, he said, they have to go “all the way to the walls.” Often the pace is so demanding that the team doesn’t have time to unpack their tents and bedding, so they sleep on the ramp. “Uncomfortable is normal,” Jennings said. “Uncomfortable is expected.”

I asked Jennings how he kept his team ready for these missions, to be the first to deploy, and with the least amount of information about what awaited them. Well, he said, they had no choice. If the call could come at any moment, procrastination was impossible. So they checked and rechecked their equipment. They packed their bags. They went for joyrides in MRZRs. They practiced each element of a deployment, segment by segment, then practiced the full run. “It’s the reps of doing something that count,” he said. “So that when they step out the door to go do it for real, while the place may be new, the thing they’re doing is routine.”

A few months after my MRZR ride with Alpha Mike, I came across a publication by an economist at MIT named Muhamet Yildiz that helped me understand what made the 621st’s work possible. Yildiz had published a working paper called “Optimism, Deadline Effect, and Stochastic Deadlines,” which was about the negative consequences of the so-called deadline effect: our tendency to wait until the last minute to get things done. It’s the plague that leads contract negotiations to drag on into the eleventh hour, the source of all settlements reached “on the courthouse steps,” and the reason you could never turn a term paper in on time. Deadlines are powerful motivators, but once you set them, work tends to get delayed until right before time expires.

Yildiz found, however, that the deadline effect disappears if the deadline is “stochastic,” which is just a fancy way of saying “random.” If, for example, the MTA and the transit workers’ union were told they had to have a new contract before the next major track fire (which occur frequently but unpredictably and which require extra labor to get under control), they would have the necessary combination of importance and randomness to strike a deal without waiting for a specific deadline. (Yildiz also pointed me to a study of eBay and Amazon auctions that showed that last-minute bidding decreased and winning bids were placed earlier when the ending time for the auction was allowed to float rather than remain fixed.)

“By imposing a deadline that is triggered by an event that will happen at a random time and is beyond the parties’ control,” Yildiz wrote, the deadline effect could be tamed. The reason for this is fairly intuitive: if you think you might run out of bargaining time at any moment, you’ll be more likely to compromise.

Alpha Mike and the rest of the 621st were pointing toward the psychic and practical benefits of that approach. They faced deadlines that were fully stochastic: natural disasters that could strike anywhere, and at any time. And yet they seemed to live a life that was somehow both high-stakes and stress-free. If you think you may be called to show your cards at any moment, you’re more likely to always be holding a strong hand. (One could make the same argument about life itself. It is, after all, an assignment with a stochastic deadline.)

As a group, they had achieved what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow”—the relish you feel when you have been stretched to your limits to accomplish a difficult and worthwhile goal. In his book on the subject, Csikszentmihalyi quotes a dancer, who describes how it feels when a performance is going well: “Your concentration is very complete. Your mind isn’t wandering, you are not thinking of something else; you are totally involved in what you are doing… You feel relaxed, comfortable, and energetic.” A person experiencing flow, Csikszentmihalyi wrote, “need not fear unexpected events, or even death.”

Now, not everyone can count on a natural disaster to keep them on their toes. But there’s a way to mimic everything else—the unit’s training exercises, the scheduled check-ins, the day-by-day work of never falling behind—to achieve the same effect. After all, even Alpha Mike didn’t need the hurricane to actually land to achieve their state of readiness.

Florence, for what it’s worth, didn’t do the type of damage that required the help of the 621st. There was death and flooding and toxic spills, but the government didn’t need to call in the relief units of the Air Force. Jennings and Vaughn and all the rest stayed home. But they were ready all the same.

By the time we arrived back from the MRZR tour, most of the squadron had assembled at Alpha Mike’s hangar. Sergeant Vaughn grabbed my helmet and put it in the back of the vehicle. He looked baffled to see so many people: the airmen had been told to gather for an announcement with no further explanation. Vaughn walked over and got in formation with all the rest.

There was a brief break in the clouds, and sunlight blasted through the hangar door as Abell and Marshall walked in to address the men and women. Recently, Marshall said, the Air Force had been told to increase the number of promotions that commanders could give out on the spot, through a program called STEP: Stripes for Exceptional Performers. (Everything in the military, no matter how wonderful, had to be given a dull and impenetrable acronym.) He asked the airmen if they had ever heard of a STEP promotion—and they admitted they had, though no one had ever seen one in person. Well, Marshall said, we’re going to do one today: “Staff Sergeant Vaughn, please step forward.” A hoot went up among the crowd.

“Son,” the commander said, “this is about to change your life.” He pulled the insignia for Staff Sergeant—four stripes around a star—off Vaughn’s arm and put one with five stripes in its place. Vaughn was now a technical sergeant. Someone handed him a bottle of champagne. The whole squadron cheered, before chanting “Speech! Speech!” (“I’ve never been part of a unit that every single person cares about you,” Vaughn said, “and the CRW is like that.”)

Afterward, Jennings told me the whole process—from getting Pentagon approval to bringing in Vaughn’s family—had come together, like seemingly everything else the 621st did, in twelve hours. “It’s literally like a World War Two battlefield promotion,” he said. He still seemed shocked at what had happened, which gives one a sense of how arduous the normal route for a promotion must be. I found Rowe and Wheeland standing nearby and asked them what they thought. “It’s very motivational,” Wheeland said, to which Jennings added, “It’s motivational when you see the right people getting it.”

At first I thought that the STEP promotion was a charming thing to witness, but it was essentially unrelated to any deadline wisdom I might cull from the 621st. Talking to Rowe and Wheeland, however, I realized that I was wrong. This was another sort of stochastic deadline, a random but powerful force that had the effect of motivating the entire squadron. A promotion, it seemed, could come at any time, as long as you were operating at a high enough level.

In some sense, every time we face a deadline we are attempting to use urgency to spur action. The trick that the 621st had figured was how to feel that urgency constantly, even when the deadline itself has disappeared.

The joke that Cyril Parkinson made in The Economist in 1955—“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”—is also a sort of life sentence for the office drudge. But what if we tried to escape this tyranny? What if we were so ready for anything, we could be relaxed about everything? Wouldn’t this state begin to look less like being on deadline and more like being at peace?

Christopher Cox, the former editor of Harper’s Magazine and executive editor of GQ, is the author The Deadline Effect: How to Work Like It's the Last Minute―Before the Last Minute, from which this article was adapted.